Red Advent
by temperednightsky
Summary: The sounds that made it through to them suggested that everything was rubble, a steaming pile of ashes made from memories and dead hopes.


**_Short Author's Note before it starts:_ I want to apologize beforehand. This is probably illogical and full of plotholes, and it might even have things in it that are not quite in line with the canon. But I still hope you'll enjoy it, because it was a small idea that was doing things to my head.**

**If you need me, I'll be over there in this corner and be ashamed of myself.**

* * *

They didn't even know that Death City had a bomb shelter underneath. Maybe it was best that almost nobody had ever known that.  
Just a few hours earlier, they were preparing for the funeral of somebody they didn't even know personally.  
Then they were herding civilians into this fully equipped and stocked shelter.  
There was food and all things needed for survival. Was this something that had been planned at some point?The place was dusty and tired.  
There were not enough people there.  
Most of them were out of their reach when they were evacuating.  
The seam of Maka's coat swished over the dusty ground as she sat down, leaning against a wall. The feathers on her coat were gently moving with every motion.  
It was the last present Blair made for her before she unwillingly left the city. A black coat with shiny, dark green feathers. She conjured it from the old one.  
She said if there was going to be a fight, then it should be a fight in style.

Maka wondered where Blair went. But it was better if she wasn't here.

She glimpsed over to Soul, who quietly sat next to her.

Just a few hours ago, she impatiently asked him if he had seen her black tights, and he informed her sarcastically that he rarely wore tights, they made his feet look wide.

He wore a scarf he bought a year ago because he saw it as a novelty. His hair was coated with the dust that covered everything in the shelter.

Their home was probably rubble by now. The place where they had so much fun, and probably the place they came to love most after all this time. The memories were probably buried under a pile of stone, possibly burning.

The sounds that made it through to them suggested that everything was rubble, a steaming pile of ashes made from memories and dead hopes.  
Their friends were out there, fighting against an army from who knows where, made up of faceless people who blindly followed some orders. Maybe they were not so different from them.

Maka and Soul didn't understand what suddenly happened to turn the world against this place. They tried to help, right? They only tried to save the rest of the world from the evil that bobbed up to the surface of humanity.  
And they should be out there and fight, too. But their orders were to evacuate civilians into the bomb shelter, and they did, they followed their orders while the world they cherished began to burn.

She wanted to go out there and defend what was still there.  
This was the only home she knew, and with every little quake that shook the shelter, another part of it was gone.

Soul poked her side.  
His face was tired and for a second she thought that she had never seen someone look so sad before, but soon noticed that he was looking at her the same way he did when she stayed up all night and felt sick the next morning.  
Maybe it was just a little bit of comfort she felt when she noticed that even in this brutal and raw chaos, he worried about her just the same way he always did.

"..you didn't listen, right." he stated, obviously not intending it to be a question.

Maka just sighed. "It's hard to listen when there are bombings every femto-second."

He ignored what she said, obviously he had her attention now. "I know you want to be out there, okay? But..we have different orders, and now we have as many people here as we could find...now what? What are we going to do?"

She didn't know. She honestly didn't. It felt like they were betraying their friends by not fighting with them.

"I don't know. You're the only deathscythe around, doesn't that make you have ideas automatically?"

"Yeah, I wish. But normally I'm only as smart as the situation allows me to be, and..." the shelter shook again and the ceiling sprayed dust all over the people it was supposed to protect.

"I wonder if papa is alright." Maka whispered quietly. She also wondered if her mother would ever know about what happened here, or if she even cared. She hadn't spoken to her since she left a long time ago. Maybe she didn't.

Soul shook his hair, causing him to make an unpleasant cloud of dust come from his hair. He still looked like he was frosted with powder made of nasty. He was uncomfortable. "He'll be alright, he's with Kid, like he should be. They will find a way."

The fact that he, and everyone else, still called Kid by this name would have made her smile for a second, if she didn't know that nothing was alright anymore, and she might never see her father again. She breathed heavily, trying to get a hold of herself.

Panic wasn't going to solve anything.  
They received this (possibly last) mission, and she was going to do a good job.

"All those people," she lowered her voice in order not to frighten the refugees, "none of them are from the school, Soul. All of them are literally civilians. And most of them are either really young or really old."

Soul ran his eyes over the crowd. All of them were terrified of what was going on out there. And Maka was right, there were mostly elderly people or they were younger than them. There were few exceptions between them.

He recognized some of the faces, there were two girls, twins who worked at a bakery close to their home. An old man who worked at the post office and took ages to hand over the right amount of stamps. There was also a nervous younger guy whom he recognized as the son of the janitor.

But most of them were strangers.  
And none of them were in any way able to fight.

"You think we should.. take attendance or something like this?" he looked back to her.

Maka nodded. "Even if it's only to make them feel safer. I think they..you know, they depend on us right, to bring them out of here alive. They believe we're going to reunite them with their families, right? We should..do our best."

He didn't grin the way he usually did. He just smiled and stroked her head.

And for a moment, she selfishly thought how happy she was to be here with him.

* * *

In the beginning, the list contained forty-three names.  
After a week without the sun and constant impacts, four people were dead.

The man from the post office was found hanging from his belt in one of the chemical toilets.  
It took them almost an hour to get him down. No one wanted to help.

One of the twins from the bakery died because she didn't have access to her medication.

"I wish I disobeyed my orders." Maka just sighed, exhaustion and lack of sleep taking her over. Her head was resting on Soul's shoulder, and he didn't look much better.

"You would be dead. And I would probably be dead too. You know I'd just follow you, even if it's stupid." He was holding her hand the whole time, like it has always been. Maybe both of them were just silently happy not to be out there, even if the guilt grew stronger in them.

"They are dying. So many of them, I can see it." She pulled her knees up to her chin and rested her forehead on them. "So many."

"Who..wait, no, just stop it. Just don't do this." He pressed her hand harder, or at least as hard as he could, tired as he was. He wanted to hug her, but at the same time, he wanted her to hug him even harder, just to make sure she was still there.

* * *

Someone was banging against the thick doors of the bomb shelter with abnormal urgency. It was a brutal, foreign sound after all this time, and both of them had no idea if it was a good idea to trust that sound.  
Maybe they though their minds were playing tricks on them, but when they looked each other in the eye, assuring that they both were hearing the same thing, the air grew heavy.

Who could it be? Maka had not used her Soul Perception anymore since Soul said she should stop. She didn't because he asked – she stopped because she wasn't sure if she could stand it.

The banging on the entrance didn't stop, and the refugees were getting anxious. After a long time without hearing from the outside world, none of them believed their ears.

Maka sighed and pulled Soul along by the hand.

"You're going to open it?" he asked, his voice as tired as always since they came here. "What if whoever it is isn't friendly?"

Before she could answer, the person outside of the door started to get impatient.

"SOUL! MAKA! IF YOU PEASANTS DON'T OPEN THE DOOR RIGHT NOW, I WILL!"

It couldn't be Black*Star, right? But then, who else had a voice powerful enough to get through the door of a bomb shelter. Perhaps it took more than a siege to nix him from existence.

"Don't hear that? The only thing unfriendly right now is him if we don't open!" she exclaimed, pulling Soul further towards the door.

After opening the heavy steel blast door with an appropriately exhausting effort, they were indeed greeted by Black*Star and Tsubaki. And the stench of a burnt reality.  
They looked miserable. If she thought they were tired, and that her stringy hair was awful, then she now at least had the confirmation that it could be worse.

Tsubaki's long ponytail was burnt down to a short one, and she wasn't even able to bring back a memory of Black*Star in which he looked more beaten than he did then. Or more broken, even if he tried his best to not make it visible.  
Before she could think of anything to say, Tsubaki pulled her into an embrace and pressed her head to her heart. Maka felt sick because in her mind, she couldn't afford to cry. Even if she wanted to.

"I almost thought you two were dead, seriously, but seems like weed doesn't die that easily." Black*Star made a motion that caused his shoulder to make a loud cracking sound and proceeded to close the blast doors. "Tsubaki wanted to check, though. Do you have any drinking water?"

"Sure, this place was equipped and fully stocked up on food when we came here. We could at least last another month here, well..if we need to." Soul obviously felt awkward after thinking his friend dead. He would know better than to think him dead next time. If there was a next time.

"That's great I guess? We need to take a break here, our base of operation got blasted. And don't give me that look, we made sure that we weren't spotted."

Black*Star was different from the last time Soul saw him. Before, he would have taken the situation as a challenge, but now, his voice carried a tone that Soul couldn't interpret, even if he wanted to. Black*Star knew what was outside of the blast doors. He didn't. He only smelled the stench of a torched city, and if he was honest, he didn't want to go out there.

By then, Tsubaki finally released Maka, if somewhat unwilling. She looked strange with her short ponytail, like a different person almost. The soot on her face didn't help.

"It's so good you two take care of all these people," she sniffed, "it's so good."

Some of the refugees were peeking in from another room. Their faces were either full of hope or downright blank and almost mindless, like they didn't care anymore.

"This bomb shelter..it's planned out carefully, it has multiple rooms and there's a passageway leading...somewhere, too. We didn't go in far, it stretched out forever." Maka stated quietly. "Do you think...this kind of martial law was expected by Shinigami-sama when he decided to put a bomb shelter under his city? That the rest of the world would at one point turn their opinion about Shibusen upside-down and declare war on it?"

The others didn't answer, but at some point, it clearly was a thought that crossed their former God's mind, so much they did understand.  
They just didn't understand why it happened.

"So," Black*Star piped up, "what's this room there for, the steel door makes me suspicious about what you are hoarding in there."

"Don't open it. I bet you have seen enough of that stuff out there." Soul just dryly remarked. "Weren't you hungry? Get over here, you can have some cold ravioli out of a can, or whatever strikes your fancy."

* * *

They were about to leave again. And it hurt.  
Tsubaki held Maka in the same fashion she did when she arrived at the shelter the day before.

It reminded Maka of her mother, the one whose whereabouts she didn't know.  
The one she had forgotten about for the last weeks.

Black*Star's arms were crossed, and again, it was evident that the things out there changed him. This time, it wasn't a war against crazy mad psycho on the moon, one where only the trained combatants would put their lives on the line.

This was literally the attempt to slice missiles with knives, and no matter how strong a weapon was, blasting it to shreds was still an option.  
And the victims were mostly not warriors.

"You know, we still have a message for you two," he finally said, after a seemingly long moment of silence, "if you hear nothing from anyone in about two weeks, your new order is to leave the city. And you're supposed to follow that order under any circumstance."

"And just how are we supposed to leave, without getting turned into charred bacon outside?" Soul asked impatiently, without any belief that they would be able to follow these orders.

Black*Star just shrugged. "Hey, didn't you find that passageway? Maybe follow it."

"It could connect to other parts of the shelter. Or maybe lead outside." Tsubaki was absentmindedly stroking Maka's hair, who just shook her head.

"If it would connect to other parts, someone would have come here already," she sighed heavily, "and what about you two, will you come back?"

After a second that felt like an eternity, Black*Star laughed in a very pressed manner. "It takes more to kill me, obviously! Why do you think they attempted to bomb this city into the ground for such a long time? We'll be back in no time! Also," he turned his head toward Soul, "he still owes me a pizza."

"You wish." Soul replied, faking a grin.

And then they left.

Both Soul and Maka knew that they would never eat that pizza together.

* * *

Why was she wearing this grey dress again? And those ripped, black tights?  
Right, there was supposed to be a funeral. A long time ago.  
She was getting ready when they receive an urgent summoning.  
The dress was dusty now, the seam was frayed.  
The coat Blair made for her, it also felt dusty.  
Her hair was greasy, and she was sure she smelled, like everyone did. So she didn't notice.

The leather of his jacket was ripped, and so was the scarf he bought as a novelty in the life they led before they were trapped in the bomb shelter.

Tsubaki and Black*Star never came back.  
It's been almost two weeks.

Their list of people was down to twenty-two, and there was no more room for another body in that sealed room. They weren't able to bury them.

Her and Soul spent their time sleeping huddled up against each other. They weren't alone, but it felt like they could never be close enough then.

"We need to leave." she just said at one point. And Soul nodded. All of the grey-faced, exhausted and resigned refugees understood.

They started to follow the dark, menacing passageway for what felt like forever.  
Along the way, the lost at least two people to the darkness, and it pained them that they couldn't return.  
They firmly held onto each others hand, even if their steps were unstable and they were shaking so much her teeth started to chatter.

The passage stretched on forever, just like they told Tsubaki and Black*Star not so long ago.  
They couldn't even remember what their voices sounded like.

When they reached the end of their way, they stood in the desert.

In the distance, they could see the charred, destroyed silhouette of their home.

They saw the school, the tented roofs of the high towers had been blasted away and bright flames were licking out of the naked walls, tinting the scene with an eerie, red color.

The was no siege anymore.

Just the aftermath of destruction.

The tears were just falling from Maka's eyes without her noticing, and she hid her face in her partner's shoulder.

That night, the purple glow of the black moon offered no solace.


End file.
